Employee Enrollment

This guide walks you through setting up the employee enrollment experience — from generating access tokens to embedding the benefits widget and monitoring enrollment status.

Prerequisites:

• An employer with employees synced and eligibility granted — see Employer Onboarding
• A webhook endpoint configured to receive events — see Webhooks

What Your Employees Will See

Before diving into the integration, here is what happens inside the embedded widget when an employee enrolls:

1. Employee opens the enrollment UI — you receive an enrollment.started event
2. Employee selects a plan and confirms — you receive both enrollment.elected and enrollment.accepted events
3. If the employee declines — you receive an enrollment.waived event instead

enrollment.elected and enrollment.accepted fire together from the same action — the employee selects a plan, signs, and confirms in a single step. There is no separate confirmation step after plan selection.

In some cases, enrollments are auto-granted by the system. When this happens, you receive an enrollment.granted event. The employee still needs to make an election.

The enrollment flow is handled entirely within the embedded widget. Your integration only needs to listen for webhook events to track enrollment progress.

Step 1: Set Up Authentication

To load the widget for a specific employee, you need a bound access token. This token scopes widget access to that employee.

curl -X POST https://api.vitablehealth.com/v1/auth/access-tokens \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VITABLE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "grant_type": "client_credentials",
    "bound_entity": {
      "type": "employee",
      "id": "empl_abc123"
    }
  }'

Bound access tokens must be generated server-side and should be short-lived. Never expose your API key in client-side code. The token scopes widget access to a specific employee.

See Authentication for full details on token types, lifetimes, and rotation.

See the Issue Access Token endpoint for the full request and response schema.

Step 2: Embed the Employee Dashboard

Use the Vitable Drops SDK to embed the employee dashboard widget in your application:

import { VitableConnectProvider, EmployeeViewWidget } from "@vitable-inc/drops/react";

<VitableConnectProvider baseUrl={widgetUrl} fetchToken={fetchTokenFn}>
  <EmployeeViewWidget height="800px" />
</VitableConnectProvider>

The widget handles the entire enrollment flow — plan selection, waiving, e-signatures, and dependent management.

For the complete integration guide with React, Python, and Node.js examples, see the Employee Dashboard Widget documentation.

Step 3: Monitor Enrollment Status

Track enrollment progress by fetching employees with their current enrollment status:

curl "https://api.vitablehealth.com/v1/employers/{employer_id}/employees" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VITABLE_API_KEY"

Enrollment statuses exposed via the API:

Status	Meaning
pending	Enrollment opportunity exists, employee has not acted
enrolled	Employee has selected a plan and enrollment is active
waived	Employee declined the benefit
inactive	Coverage has ended (terminated)

See the List Employees endpoint for the full response schema.

Step 4: Handle Terminations

When coverage ends — whether due to an employee leaving, an admin action, or a qualifying life event — you receive an enrollment.terminated webhook event. The enrollment status transitions to inactive.

For the complete enrollment state machine and all transitions, see the Enrollment Lifecycle concept page.

Troubleshooting

• Widget shows authentication error: Verify the bound access token is valid, not expired, and scoped to the correct employee. Tokens must be generated server-side — never pass your API key to the client.
• No enrollment webhooks firing: Confirm your webhook endpoint is registered and reachable. Check the Webhooks Events page for the full list of enrollment events.
• Employee status stuck on pending: The employee has not completed the enrollment flow in the widget yet. pending means the enrollment opportunity exists but no election has been made.

What’s Next

Proceed to Benefits Administration for ongoing workforce management — roster updates, lifecycle events, and payroll deductions.

Related API Endpoints

• POST /v1/auth/access-tokens — Create a bound access token
• GET /v1/employers/{id}/employees — List employees with enrollment status
• GET /v1/employees/{id}/enrollments — List enrollments for an employee